Social media is part of the job search process. You should use social media to help you find job openings and target specific companies. Once you score that interview, you shouldn’t forget the power of social media.

1. Check the business’s social media profiles

Do your research: it’s importantto walk into a job interview informed. Start with their website and move to their social media sites. It’s easiest to find their social media sites through their official webpage.

2. Do a search on Twitter

Check to see what other people are saying about the company. See how the company uses Twitter. Do they have a sense of humor, are they active or have they failed to tweet for over two months.

3. Look up the individual(s) interviewing you

Check out the interviewer’s personal and professional social media sites to get a better understanding of who they are and what they are looking for. Learn about how they use social media and their specific role at the company.

4. Look at their Pinterest boards

Pinterest often gives a unique window into a company. It can display company culture in photos. The fact that they have Pinterest boards in the first place says a lot about the company.

5. Get social

Consider retweeting or liking individual posts on the company’s social media sites. This shows that you have done your homework. This is a fine line, so use your previous research to help you decide what’s a good fit.

6. Be on top your game

Search social media for general industry terms to be on top of what is happening. Nothing is worse than walking into an interview without the latest information in your field.

7. Focus on your social media profiles

Make sure to update your profiles to show them that you’re on the cutting edge of your field and on top of social media. Post industry news on your social sites.

8. Check out other employees

See who works at the company. Check out what they do and who they are. This can help you understand the company culture better and give you an idea of whom the company hires.

9. Look at the company profile on LinkedIn

Take a look at the company overview, careers and employee insights. See how big the company is and if any of your connections connect you to the company. If this is one of your target companies be sure to follow them on LinkedIn.

10. Beef up security

Clean up your social media. You know the photo of you dancing on the bar last weekend? Take it down. If you can’t guarantee that everything on your Facebook is appropriate for an employer and your grandma make it private.

11. Google yourself

Know what is going to come up when your name is typed into Google. It’s best to be aware of this because most, if not all employers will Google you.

12. Read the company blog

Be aware of what the company is currently working on and talking about. Take it a step further and formulate an opinion on the topic. Craft questions to ask during the interview related to the current happenings at the company and how your potential role will fit into the scheme of things.

With the recovering economy, the job search can be a tough place to be. Using these tips on social media combined with normal interview preparation can propel you to the top of the candidate pile and even land you the job.

The speculation is over. Yahoo has acquired Tumblr, according to official statements from Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Tumblr CEO and Founder David Karp.

In a somewhat odd press release, Yahoo promises it will not “screw up” the popular microblogging service.

“Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business. David Karp will remain CEO. The product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators,” says Yahoo in the release.

The total price Yahoo paid for Tumblr is approximately $1.1 billion, all of it in cash.

Yahoo claims the deal offers “unique opportunities” for both companies. Yahoo plans to deploy its personalization technology and search infrastructure to Tumblr, which should help users find relevant content more easily. On the other hand, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts, 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 daily signups.

Tumblr CEO David Karp has also confirmed the acquisition in a blog post.

“Before touching on how awesome this is, let me try to allay any concerns: We’re not turning purple. Our headquarters isn’t moving. Our team isn’t changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing. And our mission – to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve – certainly isn’t changing,” wrote Karp.

The reactions we’re seeing from Tumblr users are mostly those of disappointment, though some of them are positive.

“So, I just finished watching The Goonies with my mom so I went up stairs to take a little nap. I walked past my dad, who was listening to the news on the radio, and the second I did that I heard the news about Yahoo! buying Tumblr had been confirmed after hearing these news I put my hands up and yelled “NOOOOOOOOO” and got down on my knees ‘sobbing’,” writes one Tumblr user.

Another user is expressing his disappointment in typical Tumblr fashion: through animated GIFs.

What do you think? Is Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr a good move? Which company will benefit more from the deal? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Like this:

There’s no doubt the latest crop of stable browsers from Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla are the best the companies have ever produced. But how do they perform when tested under identical conditions?

CNET put the latest stable versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer through a gauntlet of benchmarks that considered JavaScript and HTML5 performance, as well as boot times and memory usage. (Opera and Safari were not tested because they have not been updated recently, and neither has yet implemented hardware acceleration close to the level that the other three browsers have.) Note that these charts are at best a snapshot in time, and are dependent on the hardware being used and any extensions installed. The full charts are below, followed by analysis and an explanation of our methodology.

Chrome 10

Internet Explorer 9

Firefox 4

SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms)

336.20

250.60

292.37

Kraken (ms)

8,806.30

15,606.77

7265.13

V8 v6 (higher is better)

5,173.67

2,235.33

3540.33

JSGamebench 0.3* (higher is better)

322.00

1,156.00

1,482.00

Boot time (s)

26.22

21.86

17.80

Memory (kb)

390,532

205,616

148,020

Though the competition is extremely close in some cases–especially JavaScript rendering–Firefox 4 is strongly favored by HTML5 processing, boot time, and memory usage. Overall, I’d judge from these results that Firefox 4 is the winner this time around.

Chrome, however, is absolutely killing it on Google’s V8 benchmark. Expect the next version of Chrome to perform much better on the JSGamebench test, once hardware acceleration has been fully enabled. You currently have to toggle a few switches in about:flags to get it all. Also expect Chrome’s boot time and memory performance to improve–Google has said it plans to spend more time working on Chrome’s memory hogginess in the coming versions.

Given the renewed resurgence in Internet Explorer, it’s also hard to imagine that the IE development team isn’t already working on making the browser better.

Also of interest is that the SunSpider results are extremely close. The gulf between 250 milliseconds and 290 milliseconds is just not going to be that detectable by the average person.

How we tested
Our test machine was a Lenovo T400, with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 chip running at 2.53GHz, with 3GB of RAM, using Windows 7 x86. We used four publicly available tests: WebKit SunSpider 0.9.1, Mozilla Kraken 1.0, Google V8 version 6, and JSGameBench 0.3. All tests except for JSGamebench were conducted using a “cold boot” of the browser, that is, both the computer and the browser being tested were restarted before each test. Each test was performed three times, and the results you see are the averages. Browsers had all extensions and add-ons deactivated for the tests.

The boot time benchmarks were conducted by manually starting a stopwatch when clicking on the browser’s taskbar icon, and then hitting stop when the last tab’s resolving indicator stopped rotating. One half-second was subtracted from Internet Explorer 9’s pre-averaged times to account for the extra time it took to hit the Reload previous session link, since the browser doesn’t support that feature the way Firefox 4 and Chrome 10 do.

The memory test was conducted by opening the aforementioned set of tabs and looking at Google Chrome’s memory manager. You can access it by typing “about:memory” into the Chrome location bar. The figure we used is the Private Memory, which only totals memory used by the browser that’s not shared by other processes. It’s also useful because it tallies all of Chrome’s open tab memory usage into one convenient number.